We are honored to have our latest publication featured as the protocol of the week of Sept 22, 2025! We hope you check it out!
The SMART Symposia is an international academic conference organized by the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation (SMART). Our symposia, serving as a dynamic forum exploring the frontiers of the evolving genetic code, nucleic acid editing, synthetic biology and their transformative applications, will provide a platform to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and communication among biomedical researchers around the world. The symposia will also cover the 4th genetic code expansion conference. Prof. William DeGrado and Prof. Jason Chin will present as keynote speakers. The GCE technology has advanced at a rapid pace in the past ten years, propelled by both the development of new cutting-edge technical capabilities, and improved robustness of these tools. This has fueled a remarkable surge of interest in adopting this technology in both academic and industrial settings for countless enabling applications.
The 2025 GCE4All Center Workshop focused on the theory and practice of site-specifically installing non-canonical amino acids (ncAAs) that represent post-translational modifications (PTMs) in proteins. Academic and industrial attendees received hands-on training from Center scientists on how to express, purify, and characterize recombinant proteins containing site-specifically installed PTMs, including phospho-serine, non-hydrolyzable phospho-serine, phospho-threonine, acetyl-lysine, 3-nitro-tyrosine, and halogenated tyrosines. Academic attendees were invited to bring a gene of their choice for ncAA installation. A series of lectures discussed the practice, theory, history, strengths and challenges of Genetic Code Expansion as it relates to installing PTMs and characterizing PTM-proteins. This year's group of participants represented over 10 different academic and industry labs spanning 3 countries!
Participants of the 2025 GCE Workshop
Excited to see a DBP publication highlighted by Nature Chemistry, we hope it finds you NMR users!
"NMR spectroscopy is a critical tool for linking protein structure, dynamics and interactions to protein function, but is challenging to apply to high-molecular-weight proteins. The chemical synthesis of an NMR probe combines the advantages of four different nuclei, 1H, 2H, 13C and 19F, to achieve optimal resolution for these larger systems."
Alexander ND, Gangarde YM, Bednar RM, Karplus PA, Cooley RB, Mehl RA. Selecting aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase/tRNA pairs for efficient genetic encoding of noncanonical amino acids into proteins. Nat Protoc. 2025
Jana S, Eddins AJ, Gangarde YM, Karplus PA, Mehl RA. Tuning Encodable Tetrazine Chemistry for Site-Specific Protein Bioorthogonal Ligations. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2025
Eddins AJ, Gangarde YM, Singh A, Jana S, Zheng Y, Alexander ND, Reitsma JM, Cooley RB, Karplus PA, Mehl RA. Quantitative Protein Labeling in Live Cells by Controlling the Redox State of Encoded Tetrazines. J Am Chem Soc. 2025
Zheng Y, Singh A, Niu Z, Marin V, Young J, Richardson P, Hemshorn ML, Cooley RB, Karplus PA, Puvar K, Warder SE, Vasudevan A, Reitsma JM, Mehl RA. In-Cell Approach to Evaluate E3 Ligases for Use in Targeted Protein Degradation. J Am Chem Soc. 2025
Eddins AJ, Pung AH, Cooley RB, Mehl RA. Tetrazine Amino Acid Encoding for Rapid and Complete Protein Bioconjugation. Bio Protoc. (2024).
Allen MC, Karplus PA, Mehl RA, Cooley RB. Genetic Encoding of Phosphorylated Amino Acids into Proteins. Chem Rev. (2024)
Saleh IG, Shimogawa M, Ramirez J, Abakah B, Venkatesh Y, James HP, Li MH, Louie SA, Lougee MG, Chia WK, Brue C, Cooley RB, Mehl RA, Baumgart T, Mach RH, Eliezer D, Rhoades E, Petersson EJ. Genetic code expansion and enzymatic modifications as accessible methods for studying site-specific post-translational modifications of alpha-synuclein and tau. Protein Sci. 2025
Boeszoermenyi A, Radeva DL, Schindler S, Valadares V, Padmanabha Das KM, Dubey A, Viennet T, Schmitt M, Kast P, Gelev VM, Stoyanov N, Burdzhiev N, Petrov O, Ficarro S, Marto J, Geffken EA, Dhe-Paganon S, Seo HS, Alexander ND, Cooley RB, Mehl RA, Kovacs H, Anklin C, Bermel W, Kuprov I, Takeuchi K, Arthanari H. Leveraging relaxation-optimized 1H-13CF correlations in 4-19F-phenylalanine as atomic beacons for probing structure and dynamics of large proteins. Nat Chem. 2025
Koh DS, Stratiievska A, Jana S, Otto SC, Swanson TM, Nhim A, Carlson S, Raza M, Naves LA, Senning EN, Mehl RA, Gordon SE. Genetic code expansion, click chemistry, and light-activated PI3K reveal details of membrane protein trafficking downstream of receptor tyrosine kinases. Elife. 2024
Chadda R, Kaushik V, Ahmad IM, Deveryshetty J, Holehouse AS, Sigurdsson ST, Biswas G, Levy Y, Bothner B, Cooley RB, Mehl RA, Dastvan R, Origanti S, Antony E. Partial wrapping of single-stranded DNA by replication protein A and modulation through phosphorylation. Nucleic Acids Res. 2024
Galles GD, Infield DT, Clark CJ, Hemshorn ML, Manikandan S, Fazan F, Rasouli A, Tajkhorshid E, Galpin JD, Cooley RB, Mehl RA, Ahern CA. Tuning phenylalanine fluorination to assess aromatic contributions to protein function and stability in cells. Nat Commun. 2023